*Soraya in a field of fall brassicas under a double rainbow, photo by Vanessa Bedoya Melguizo*

CSA Balance Due

This is the last week of the summer CSA season, please finish paying for your CSA share. You can pay online through your account (with a card or e-check ACH payment), mail a check to Evening Song Farm 48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville VT 05738, leave a check or cash in the CSA cash box at the barn, send money with Venmo @eveningsongcsa, or use EBT. It helps us a lot to not have to track down summer payments after this season has ended. Thank you!

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow beets, red beets, yellow potatoes, red potatoes, mesclun mix, green napa cabbage, celery, baby kale, baby lettuce, arugula, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, garlic, seed garlic, husk cherries, poblano peppers, jalapeño peppers, green serrano peppers, tomatillos, shallots, leeks, carrots, Painted Mountain grain corn, brussels sprouts, maybe butternut squash, watermelon radish, daikon radish, spinach, cilantro, pea shoots, eggplant, endive, mini Romaine heads, maybe broccoli, and green and red head lettuce.

If you do any bulk preserving, now is a great time to snag jalapenos (or serranos, both $6/pound) in bulk if you use any for fermenting, hot sauce, pickled jalapenos, jalapeno jelly, or whatever! Send us an email if we should put anything aside for you.

If you are looking for seed garlic for your garden, we have German Red and German White seed garlic available for $12/pound. Reach out if you want any.

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag

Ordering closes at noon on Tuesdays for Wednesday bags, and at midnight on Wednesdays for Friday bags.

You do not need to fill out the form if you plan to come to the barn on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Farm News

Thank you for being a part of our summer CSA season! CSA is the biggest part of what we do, and it’s our favorite way to get veggies into the community. Your seasonal commitment is the foundation for this farm’s success and ability to focus on food production and land stewardship instead of marketing. We will get a survey together soon to get feedback from your experience this year, but until then, a big thank you from all of us to you all for choosing this farm. Thank you!

If you are planning to do the fall CSA season, sign ups available here. If you pick up at the barn, you can just email me the share size you are planning to sign up for.

Great week here: We got almost all the carrots dug, sorted, washed, bagged, and stored for the winter. Some of the beds grew some REALLY big carrots. It was surprisingly impressive given the timing of this planting with the summer floods. We had to reseed several beds that were washed away or rotted the seeds, and some areas were then overseeded, and we didn’t get to thin them, but overall, the majority of the carrots we got to harvest were gorgeous and delicious, and have taken up a lot of great space in the coolers and root cellar.

We also tucked in an experimental planting of overwintered onions. We learned about this method from Pleasant Valley Farm in Argyle, NY, and they have great success with it. We adapted it a bit to our low- and no-till growing methods by make ridges in a garden plot after tarping, then Ryan planted a dense oats and peas cover crop on that field. After it created a lot of biomass, it was mowed to die in place as a mulch, and then we planted little onion sets into the ridges through the cover crop debris. We will row cover these plantings over winter, and we expect fun early spring onions that grow in a relatively weed free field thanks to the cover crop mulch. As we planted the sets, Ryan remarked that some of the low- and no- till methods we have developed actually remind us of our very early attempts at gardening when we had very little idea what we are doing! If someone dropped by the farm this week, they would have seen us poking butter knives through a thick mat of green grasses (the cover crops) instead of into a nice, tidy, fluffy, clear garden bed. And yet this method has worked incredibly well for other crops, we have optimism for some version of success with this.

We finally had our garlic splitting competition between the new tool Ryan acquired to break up cloves versus my incredibly speedy and strong hands. (Check out a brief video clip from it at the bottom of the newsletter!) Unsurprising to me (but surprising to Ryan), I was able to split up both varieties of our seed garlic faster than him and his machine. (To be fair, I use an incredibly effective method of slamming the stem down on a board while loosely holding the bulb, and this pushes the stem through the basal plate of the garlic, making the clove separation a quick and easy task when it’s stem-less.) We are borrowing this tool this fall to see if we want it as part of our toolkit. Despite hands winning the competition, Ryan believes we will still purchase the tool to save our hands long term since he claims that no one else wants to slam garlic stems with the speed and focus I used to triumph over his machine for the several thousand garlic bulbs we split up to plant. Probably true. But I still revel in beating machines.

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Cindy, Galen, Katie, K2, Taylor, Vanessa, Bryan, and Tabita (and Sky and Soraya)

Weekly Recipe

Savory Waffles